Many applications within natural language processing involve performing text-to-text transformations, i.e., given a text in natural language as input, systems are required to produce a version of this text (e.g., a translation), also in natural language, as output. Automatically evaluating the output of such systems is an important component in developing text-to-text applications. Two approaches have been proposed for this problem: (i) to compare the system outputs against one or more reference outputs using string matching-based evaluation metrics and (ii) to build models based on human feedback to predict the quality of system outputs without reference texts. Despite their popularity, reference-based evaluation metrics are faced with the challenge that multiple good (and bad) quality outputs can be produced by text-to-text approaches for the same input. This variation is very hard to capture, even with multiple reference texts. In addition, reference-based metrics cannot be used in production (e.g., online machine translation systems), when systems are expected to produce outputs for any unseen input. In this book, we focus on the second set of metrics, so-called Quality Estimation (QE) metrics, where the goal is to provide an estimate on how good or reliable the texts produced by an application are without access to gold-standard outputs. QE enables different types of evaluation that can target different types of users and applications. Machine learning techniques are used to build QE models with various types of quality labels and explicit features or learnt representations, which can then predict the quality of unseen system outputs. This book describes the topic of QE for text-to-text applications, covering quality labels, features, algorithms, evaluation, uses, and state-of-the-art approaches. It focuses on machine translation as application, since this represents most of the QE work done to date. It also briefly describes QE for several other applications, including text simplification, text summarization, grammatical error correction, and natural language generation.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 16th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2020, held in Hohhot, China, in October 2020. The 13 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 78 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2019, held in Nanchang, China, in September 2019. The 10 full papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 21 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2020, held in Xining, China, in October 2021. The 10 papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 25 submissions and focus on all aspects of machine translation, including preprocessing, neural machine translation models, hybrid model, evaluation method, and post-editing.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th China Workshop on Machine Translation, CWMT 2016, held in Urumqi, China, in August 2016. The 10 English papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 76 submissions. They deal with statistical machine translation, hybrid machine translation, machine translation evaluation, post editing, alignment, and inducing bilingual knowledge from corpora.

Machine translation has become increasingly popular, especially with the introduction of neural machine translation in major online translation systems. However, despite the rapid advances in machine translation, the role of a human translator remains crucial. As illustrated by the chapters in this book, man-machine interaction is essential in machine translation, localisation, terminology management, and crowdsourcing translation. In fact, the importance of a human translator before, during, and after machine processing, cannot be overemphasised as human intervention is the best way to ensure the translation quality of machine translation. This volume explores the role of a human translator in machine translation from various perspectives, affording a comprehensive look at this topical research area. This book is essential reading for anyone involved in translation studies, machine translation or interested in translation technology.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2023, held in Jinan, China, during October 19–21, 2023. The 8 full papers and 3 short papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 71 submissions. They focus on machine translation; improvement of translation models and systems; translation quality estimation; document-level machine translation; low-resource machine translation.

This two-volume set of LNAI 11838 and LNAI 11839 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th CCF Conference on Natural Language Processing and Chinese Computing, NLPCC 2019, held in Dunhuang, China, in October 2019. The 85 full papers and 56 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 492 submissions. They are organized in the following topical sections: Conversational Bot/QA/IR; Knowledge graph/IE; Machine Learning for NLP; Machine Translation; NLP Applications; NLP for Social Network; NLP Fundamentals; Text Mining; Short Papers; Explainable AI Workshop; Student Workshop: Evaluation Workshop.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th China Conference on Machine Translation, CCMT 2022, held in Lhasa, China, during August 6–10, 2022. The 16 full papers were included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 73 submissions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7h Language and Technology Conference: Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics, LTC 2015, held in Poznan, Poland, in November 2015. The 31 revised papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 108 submissions. The papers selected to this volume belong to various fields of: Speech Processing; Multiword Expressions; Parsing; Language Resources and Tools; Ontologies and Wordnets; Machine Translation; Information and Data Extraction; Text Engineering and Processing; Applications in Language Learning; Emotions, Decisions and Opinions; Less-Resourced Languages.